The Challenge
As part of our Enrollment, Marketing and Communications goals, our broader team of more than 30 people, including recruiters, researchers, designers, and others, led a major upgrade of the university’s primary CRM. Leadership chose Salesforce, a significant financial investment that required buy-in from admissions, alumni and development, and campus leaders across the institution. But Salesforce’s built-in email tools are notoriously difficult: inefficient, far from user-friendly, and burdened with a steep learning curve. On top of that sat the universal headache of email design itself, where code that looks right in one inbox breaks in another. I was responsible for the email communication flow templates that partners across campus would use, from marketing and enrollment to the Office of the President. The process needed to be faster, more flexible, and far easier for non-designers to use.
The Strategy
Rather than accept the limitations of the platform, I decided to build around them. Using AI, specifically Anthropic’s Claude and Claude Code, I designed and developed a standalone web application I named Mailami. The goal was a tool that let our team and campus partners assemble polished, on-brand emails quickly, accommodate the constant changes and one-off needs of different departments, and sidestep the email-client compatibility problems that make email design so fragile. It is also a clear picture of how I now work: pairing creative direction with AI to ship real solutions, not just briefs.
The Design
Mailami works the way designers and non-designers both need it to. A visual, drag-and-drop editor lets users build emails from modular rows and columns, with full control over content and styling and no code required. A reusable row library stores pre-built, on-brand components, such as headers, footers, and event blocks, so common pieces can be dropped in and reused across projects. Branded templates for different campus voices, from enrollment to athletics to the Office of the President, keep everything consistent. And when a campaign is ready, Mailami exports clean, client-tested HTML, solving the rendering problems that plague Salesforce and email design in general.
The Outcome
Mailami proved both highly effective and cost-effective for our team and campus partners. Once the initial templates were in place, an email that used to take a full day to code could be built in about 30 minutes, a dramatic gain in speed that also let non-designers produce on-brand communications without a steep learning curve. It turned a slow, technical, error-prone process into a fast and approachable one and saved the time and expense of fighting Salesforce’s native tools. More than a single deliverable, it reflects a broader shift in how I lead: identifying a real operational problem and using AI to design and build the solution myself.
